E3 Day 3: Home again, WAR, and more WAR!

Ahhh good to be home again. E3 is over and now I can sit down and collect my thoughts on all the games I’ve seen and developers I’ve spoken to over the past three days. Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Who wants to hear about WAR?! Well let me first say that I’ll be releasing tons of content over at the Vault probably later tonight or tomorrow depending on when it’s put up.

I’ll start by giving you a rundown of how the day went.

Graev and I headed to the convention center a little early this morning (about 30 minutes early) to check out a few games and just chill outside of the EA room. On our way to the EA room we crossed paths with Paul Barnett and Josh Drescher! We stopped and greeted each other for a minute and then continued on to the EA room. Paul mentioned something about looking for Batman swag (I hope you got some Paul! SoE had a cool Bat signal pen). About 10 minutes later Paul and Josh walked up to the EA room and talked with us again. This time they were joined shortly after by Jeff “the” Hickman and the party was complete. This lasted about 20 minutes before it was time for us to go in for our EA appointment.

As we were entering Mark Jacobs walked up at the same time and we introduced ourselves to him. When I said to him “Hi, my name is Doug Lundberg” I didn’t see any reaction from him. Then I mentioned “I’m Keen or MeanKeenLurikeen” and I got a reaction. “Ohh, you’re Keen!” he said. Woot! Mark Jacobs knows of me. /nerd moment. After the introductions he walked us in personally to Mythic’s area of EA’s room and presented us to Adam Gershowitz. Adam spent the next 30 minutes demoing the game for us and showing us tons of great things. I’ll be writing up all those details in my article for the Vault but let me just say…. OMG the game is awesome guys. It’s come so far and words don’t describe the pure and simple joy I’m feeling that WAR is turning out to be everything I had ever hoped.

After the demo I spoke with several other devs and then was told that Mark Jacobs would answer any questions I had for him. For me this was my opportunity to get to know the guy a little bit more and ask him some of the questions that you (my readers) and the community wanted to know. I was a little worried that I wouldn’t have enough questions for him since Adam Gershowitz answered over half of them in the demonstration of the game but nevertheless my interview with mark lasted 36minutes and 15 seconds. I’ll include the info of the interview for you guys in my Vault coverage and probably take my time transcribing it for later.  I have a whole new level of respect for Mark.   He’s such the opposite of arrogant like some people think.  He’s incredibly honest and one of those people you know are “real”.  He cares about WAR – that much is unmistakable to me.   It was a pleasure getting to meet and talk to him.

After all the WAR stuff we had some time to look around at the rest of the games. I really couldn’t take my eyes off WAR except to get a demonstration of SPORE from one of the Maxis devs. ANOTHER awesome game that I’ll talk more about later when I’ve had more than 30 seconds to breathe.

I have all this information swimming in my head and I almost don’t even know where to begin. I need to sit down and get to work on my writeups that way you guys actually have information and not just me saying how awesome it all is… btw, did I mention how awesome WAR is?

  • yeah I was just getting a little impatient. I’ve read things on that site where betas get leaked and the testers say it’s awesome and all. But it is nice to have confirmation from a blogger who’s (…whose?) opinion I actually respect. Looking forward to the slew of articles that are incoming.

  • Good to hear you got to see E3 🙂

    Are you guys still going to play War btw after they removed half the game ? What was it four classes, four capital cities and much more just removed 🙁

  • @Verus: Mark Jacobs addressed that and it’s absolutely not 1/2 the game. It’s not 1/3 the game. It’s not 1/10th of the game. Heck, it’s not even 1/20th of the game removed. Look for more info on that coming very soon.

  • LOL, They did not remove half the content. This game is the one that will give WoW a run for the money. People are taking the loss of 4 characters and the capital cities way to hard. There are still a ton of classes and cities can easily be added later. There already is a ton of stuff to do in the game and plenty of end game stuff to keep people busy until they release the other cities.

  • This is so sweet, Keen. Please link the vault page when you finish the article.

  • Ever feel like a tidal wave is about to hit you? there are alot of sites announcing a bunch of info is coming. WHA is revamping the site with wiki and new categories, same with The Greeenskin and Adam Gershowitz’s comment to massively etc etc.. W:AR is almost here!

  • Happy to hear the trip went well !
    I’m definitely jealous ><

    same as singlmalt… because I have no clue where or what the Vault is… “p

  • Interview with Mark Jacobs sounds real promising. So does WAR. I don’t know, but after even reading this little bit of info about the game, and being down about it since the news recently… reading what you had to say there makes me want WAR more than ever.

    It sounds like you were really impressed with the game.

  • i love how you all can get so into these games.. i have a hard time sticking to one for over a month

  • @Keen
    Lol. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, ‘really impressed’ sounded like it fit well, haha. I’m really happy it looks to be good though after the whole thing the other week, I was so down on the game then!

    @Ghu
    Different strokes for different folks. I love building up characters, and MMOs do a good job of letting you do that.

  • Did you ask them btw Keen why the removed all the towns, classes etc from the game instead of delaying it a bit ? Was it EA pushing that or ?

    I would rather they wait a bit and release when everything is ready.

  • If I’m not mistaken the removal of the cities was not all about not having time to complete them, it was just as much a question of problems making it work properly so the game would be fun to play. As they’ve said before “if it doesn’t work and reports from testers is that its not fun, its gonna be cut”. But thats how in understood it, might be wrong 😛

  • Yeah, feels good to hear good things about WAR. You don’t know how you made my day. It’s maybe weird but i’m also very happy to hear that the dev team are nice guys. Thanks for all m8 ^_-

  • Keen,

    Thanks for the awesome news!

    I’m really really really LF to WAR.

    And I can’t wait to hear from you re: the class cuts and how existing classes were tweaked (which does concern me) to account for the lack of tanking classes for 2 races.

    By the way, did you have to cover all the costs of going to E3? E.g. E3 admission, plane tickets, hotel, etc?

  • Loved reading your experiences the past few days. Your excitement for WAR has been contagious, as I’ve been a bit lukewarm on it till now. Look forward to seeing what you put up at the Vault.

  • I think they could have shown anything after the “oh youre Keen” and he’d have said it was great. 😛

    Has Keen been bought!? *_*

  • Yeah yeah, they knew who you were… the important question was, were they craning their necks to look around you to see if I was there too?

    Awesome man, glad you had a great trip!

  • And the suspense builds…

    The demo that you saw, was it the build that is currently in beta or their current internal build? I keep hearing that their internal build is much better than what’s in beta.

    It’s good to hear that WAR is coming along well… can’t wait for the articles. 🙂

  • @Verus: It was THEIR decision to remove them and they had a very good reason. Mark explained it perfectly to me in the interview. I’ll get that up as soon as possible.

  • I have to say, I’m completely past the cuts of cities and classes, I’ll just be happy to play the game ~Sept or so.

    I may have to go dark on the info a bit, I’d like to approach the game fresh on release.

    I’m still hoping they don’t lift the NDA too soon, or they keep ‘open’ beta short, just long enough to get their last bits together rather than use it to build more hype. I really do not want to feel blunted with a bunch of pre-cookie cutter PvP strategies on launch day.

    Ahhh well, there are always concerns one way or another. =)

  • Heh… I told you Keen! 🙂 I’m so glad you finally got to play it and had your dreams answered. I think the Lurikeen’s found his home as a Gobbo come fall. 😀

  • Sounds exhausting but satisfying .. in a post-christmas and new years shock kind of way.. 😉 Glad you learned a lot. Definitely looking forward to the NDA lifting.